<p>The authors describe THERE (the heterogeneous environment for remote execution), a general-purpose facility designed to simplify the adaptation of nonnetworked, nonheterogeneous applications to a distributed heterogeneous environment. Existing applications made accessible with THERE become heterogeneous network services, and users of those services become heterogeneous network clients. They discuss the problems of remote computation, provide an overview of THERE, and describe the building of THERE applications. They present TPL, THERE programming language, which is tailored toward building execution environments for application programs (on the server sided), defining client interfaces to remote services (on the client side), and providing system-independent communication between client and server interfaces.</p>